What London planners can learn from a Rhode Island town’s better planning question

London’s 33 boroughs are at various stages of preparing their local plans – the statutory documents that guide development, housing, transport and public space for the next 15 to 20 years. The process typically involves public consultations, drop-in sessions, online surveys and committee hearings. Yet turnout is often low, and the conversations that do happen tend to revolve around specific projects, objections and competing interests. Could a different opening question change the quality of the entire planning conversation?

A town in Rhode Island, United States, recently tested exactly that. The results offer a quiet but instructive case study for any city – including London – that relies on public engagement to shape long-term planning.

The Smithfield question

Smithfield, founded in 1730, is a town of roughly 22,000 people in Providence County, Rhode Island. When its planning department began updating the community’s comprehensive plan – the American equivalent of a local plan – director Gregory Guertin decided not to follow the usual script.

Instead of asking residents what they wanted to see built over the next 20 years, Guertin invited them to tell a story: “Tell us about a moment, place, or experience in Smithfield that shaped how you feel about this town.”

The question was deliberately open-ended. It steered the conversation away from sticky dots and wish lists and toward lived experience. The planning department heard memories of village squares, school runs, open spaces and family traditions. From those stories, participants began to identify shared values: community, strong schools, open space, and the distinct character of Smithfield’s villages.

The next step, facilitated by Strong Towns chief technical advisor Edward Erfurt, turned those values into principles. Then came the hardest question: when a town cannot have everything, what should it lean toward?

The answers surprised Guertin. Nearly every table arrived at the same point – financial sustainability. How do you support good schools while respecting what taxpayers can afford? How do you preserve open space while acknowledging growth pressures? How do you protect village character without pretending trade-offs do not exist?

One table distilled the thinking into a blunt phrase: “Once it’s gone, it is gone forever.” Another wrote “Start little, takes time” – a phrase Guertin recognised from the Strong Towns presentation earlier that evening. Someone even wrote “stroads” in quotation marks on the worksheet, as if testing a new term.

Those were not policy recommendations. They were signs that residents had begun to develop a shared language for thinking about trade-offs. The conversation had shifted from reacting to proposals to discovering the values that should guide every future decision.

A principle-based, not project-based, foundation

The comprehensive plan itself – the zoning districts, land use maps, transportation plans – has not yet been written. But the foundation is in place. It sits on worksheets full of stories about villages, schools, open space, and what people are willing to give up to protect them.

What the Smithfield process did not do is produce a neat list of projects or a consensus on densities. It did something more fundamental: it established a set of principles that can guide every subsequent decision. When a developer proposes a scheme, the planning committee can ask: does this align with the community’s stated values? When a highway authority proposes a road widening, residents can ask: does this protect the village character we said we would preserve?

The process is also replicable. It does not require expensive software or large budgets. It requires a willingness to let go of the standard script and trust that residents can articulate what matters most.

What London could take from this

London’s local plan consultations are governed by statutory requirements, but the format is largely left to each borough. Most follow a familiar pattern: a consultation portal, a few public meetings, and a deadline for written representations. The result, as any planning officer will tell you, is often a pile of objections and a list of desired projects with little sense of the community’s underlying priorities.

The Smithfield approach suggests an alternative. Instead of starting with a draft plan and asking for comments, a borough could begin with a question: “What places, experiences or features of this neighbourhood shape how you feel about living here?” The answers would not produce a zoning map, but they could produce a values framework against which the rest of the plan could be tested.

Several London boroughs are already experimenting with more creative engagement. Lambeth’s cooperative planning approach, Hackney’s neighbourhood planning forums, and the Mayor of London’s public engagement for the London Plan all try to move beyond the traditional consultation. None has yet gone as far as Smithfield in starting with an open-ended storytelling question.

The risk is that such a process feels slow or inconclusive. Smithfield’s plan is still being written. No immediate development decisions came out of the storytelling workshops. For a borough under pressure to deliver housing targets and meet approval deadlines, the approach may seem impractical.

But the corollary is also true. The current system often produces plans that are contested from the moment they are adopted. A values-based foundation, even if it takes longer to build, could reduce the number of appeals, objections and legal challenges later in the process.

What to watch next

Smithfield’s comprehensive plan is still in its early stages. The document, its zoning districts, land use maps and transportation policies have not yet been drafted. What exists is a set of community-authored principles that will guide the writing.

For London planners, the case study is worth monitoring. The next time a borough begins a local plan review, it could decide to ask a better question. The answer might not be a list of projects. It might be a shared understanding of what is worth protecting – and what the community is willing to give up to protect it.

Source: Strong Towns, “A Better Comprehensive Plan Begins With a Better Question”, 29 July 2026, https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2026-7-29-a-better-comprehensive-plan-begins-with-a-better-question